[closer-devel] Efficiently composing layers in contextl

[Dan Lentz]

ContextL remains a favorite of mine and as I've recently been doing some
work in Clojure I naturally started thinking about if/how "context
orientation" might fit into the (very different) clojure universe and
culture.  I'm not sure it would be a popular idea actually I considered the
clojurians might throw tomatoes at me for bringing it up... Largely I think
it would be focused on the idea of dynamically composable contexts for
dispatch of multifunctions -- or something similar.  The layers and layered
functions are largely what I have wound up using in ContextL; I haven't
gotten many cases to use layered objects.

So in dreaming up ways to model layers I started to consider the Patricia
trie, which is an efficiently mergeable integer map.  Thus, layers could be
dynamically composed very quickly.  I know a major performance cost in
ContextL is in composing the layers (after which they are cached and after
the first use of a context, access is quite efficient).  So my question is,
has anyone considered such an alternative means of modeling layers in
ContextL and if so, what were the detractions that led you to dismiss the
idea?

I actually don't have a pressing need for context-oriented clojure.  This
is more of just a concept I've been playing with because my experience with
ContextL has been so positive.

Best regards,
Dan
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